Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Aspect-oriented domain analysis

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaDomain analysis (DA) consists of analyzing properties, concepts and solutions for a given domain of application. Based on that information, decisions are made concerning the software development for future application within that domain. In DA, feature modeling is used to describe common and variable requirements for software systems. Nevertheless, they show a limited view of the domain. In the mean time, requirement approaches can be integrated to specify the domain requirements. Among them, we have viewpoint oriented approaches that stand out by their simplicity, and efficiency organizing requirements. However, none of them deals with modularization of crosscutting subjects. A crosscutting subject can be spread out in several requirement documents. In this work we will use a viewpoint oriented approach to describe the domain requirements extended with aspects. Aspect-oriented domain analysis (AODA) is a growing area of interest as it addresses the problem of specifying crosscutting properties at the domain analysis level. The goal of this area is to obtain a better reuse at this abstraction level through the advantages of aspect orientation. The aim of this work is to propose an approach that extends domain analysis with aspects also using feature modeling and viewpoint

Knowledge data discovery and data mining in a design environment

Designers, in the process of satisfying design requirements, generally encounter difficulties in, firstly, understanding the problem and secondly, finding a solution [Cross 1998]. Often the process of understanding the problem and developing a feasible solution are developed simultaneously by proposing a solution to gauge the extent to which the solution satisfies the specific requirements. Support for future design activities has long been recognised to exist in the form of past design cases, however the varying degrees of similarity and dissimilarity found between previous and current design requirements and solutions has restrained the effectiveness of utilising past design solutions. The knowledge embedded within past designs provides a source of experience with the potential to be utilised in future developments provided that the ability to structure and manipulate that knowledgecan be made a reality. The importance of providing the ability to manipulate past design knowledge, allows the ranging viewpoints experienced by a designer, during a design process, to be reflected and supported. Data Mining systems are gaining acceptance in several domains but to date remain largely unrecognised in terms of the potential to support design activities. It is the focus of this paper to introduce the functionality possessed within the realm of Data Mining tools, and to evaluate the level of support that may be achieved in manipulating and utilising experiential knowledge to satisfy designers' ranging perspectives throughout a product's development

Stakeholder involvement, motivation, responsibility, communication: How to design usable security in e-Science

e-Science projects face a difficult challenge in providing access to valuable computational resources, data and software to large communities of distributed users. Oil the one hand, the raison d'etre of the projects is to encourage members of their research communities to use the resources provided. Oil the other hand, the threats to these resources from online attacks require robust and effective Security to mitigate the risks faced. This raises two issues: ensuring that (I) the security mechanisms put in place are usable by the different users of the system, and (2) the security of the overall system satisfies the security needs of all its different stakeholders. A failure to address either of these issues call seriously jeopardise the success of e-Science projects.The aim of this paper is to firstly provide a detailed understanding of how these challenges call present themselves in practice in the development of e-Science applications. Secondly, this paper examines the steps that projects can undertake to ensure that security requirements are correctly identified, and security measures are usable by the intended research community. The research presented in this paper is based Oil four case studies of c-Science projects. Security design traditionally uses expert analysis of risks to the technology and deploys appropriate countermeasures to deal with them. However, these case studies highlight the importance of involving all stakeholders in the process of identifying security needs and designing secure and usable systems.For each case study, transcripts of the security analysis and design sessions were analysed to gain insight into the issues and factors that surround the design of usable security. The analysis concludes with a model explaining the relationships between the most important factors identified. This includes a detailed examination of the roles of responsibility, motivation and communication of stakeholders in the ongoing process of designing usable secure socio-technical systems such as e-Science. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Consistency in Multi-Viewpoint Architectural Design of Enterprise Information Systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations between such views. To help produce a consistent design the framework also aids in specifying consistency rules that apply to the view relations and in checking the consistency according to those rules. The framework focuses on the higher levels of abstraction in a design, we refer to design at those levels of abstraction as architectural design. The highest level of abstraction that we consider is that of business process design and the lowest level is that of software component design. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts that is common to viewpoints in the area of enterprise information systems. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) a basis for defining re-usable consistency rules. In particular we define re-usable rules to check consistency between behavioural views that overlap or are a refinement of each other. We also present an architecture for a tool suite that supports our framework. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t

Business and Information System Alignment Theories Built on eGovernment Service Practice: An Holistic Literature Review

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This chapter examines previous studies of alignment between business and information systems holistically in relation to the development of working associations among professionals from information system and business backgrounds in business organization and eGovernment sectors while investigating alignment research that permits the development and growth of information system, which is appropriate, within budget and on-time development. The process of alignment plays a key role in the construction of dependent associations among individuals from two different groups, and the progress of alignment could be enhanced by emerging an information system according to the investors’ prospects. The chapter presents system theory to gather and analyze the data across the designated platforms. The outcomes classify that alignment among business and information system departments remains a priority and is of worry in different ways in diverse areas, which provides prospects for the forthcoming discussion and research.Final Published versio

Integrating the theme approach with aspectual scenarios

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaAspect-oriented requirements engineering emerged to deal with crosscutting requirements, i.e. requirements that are scattered in the requirements document and tangled with other requirements. There are several aspect-oriented requirements approaches - Theme, proposed by Baniassad and Clarke [7], is one of them. This approach is characterized by the identification of a set of actions associated to verbs present in requirements documentation. These actions are then analyzed in order to identify crosscutting behaviours, each one constituting a potential theme. One problem with this approach is that the composition mechanism is not expressive enough even when the Theme models are integrated to analysis models (e.g. UML diagrams). The MATA approach [24] provides powerful composition mechanisms, based on graph transformations that used UML models, in particular behaviour models (e.g. sequence or activity like diagrams). These models express scenarios that constitute a very popular and used technique to specify a system’s behaviour. Therefore, the result of the integration of these two approaches will be synergetic. Also, considering that in a system not only the expected situations happen, scenarios can also be used to illustrate unexpected situations, making their treatment possible. Negative scenarios are thus also considered, besides the positive ones: their representation is similar, only differing from an optimist and mostly assumed vision of the system’s behavior. These scenarios could be identified with Theme and mapped into MATA. In summary, the objective of this dissertation is twofold: firstly, we will integrate Theme with Aspectual Scenarios (specified in MATA); secondly, we will extend Theme to include the modeling of negative scenarios. The result will be the synergy between two complementary techniques, including the specification of undesirable situations, where behavioral and structural aspect modeling are integrated